Re: [GnomeMeeting-list] Asking for opinion

[Derek Smithies <derek indranet co nz>]

Hi,
 Stephen Cook and I discussed this question this question and came to the 
following conclusions.

If you make Ekiga a gtk only application, then it will be portable to 
windows. 
When ekiga is run on a windows box, windows users will hate it, cause
things like 
  a) copy and paste to native windows apps don't work too well.
  b) integration with native windows apps (addressbook, notes etc) don't work
  

If you make Ekiga a gnome only application, you will have to be prepared 
to cope the faq: "how hard is a windows port".

If you make Ekiga a gnome only application with nice integration to the
gnome features of addressbook etc, some linux users will hate it, cause
they cannot compile and run it on their old box which is (say) redhat 9.
with a 1 ghz cpu. Even if they do update their distro to a recent gnome,
their cpu is so slow that all graphical things take forever to load. So
linux users with slow boxes will hate it, cause it is slow to display
windows etc.

We discussed gaim also, which (at one stage) had the same problem of if 
they should support windows and be a gtk only application. Sadly, neither 
of us had sufficient information to learn from gaim's experience. I wonder 
if anyone on this list can comment, so we can all learn from gaim's 
experience.

We talked about a layered approach:
[GUI - Platform Specific]  [Libraries - Portable]

Thus: platform specific things (such as desktop integration)  belongs in
the gui, and not in the library. By using pwlib/opal, we get the generic
things in the library. Make Ekiga gnome only, the platform specific things
are in the app.

Of course, if you take the approach of doing both (gtk and gnome with a 
configure switch), you end up writing two applications. A gtk frontend for 
opal, and a gnome front end for opal.


Good luck in the discussions!

Derek.



On Fri, 30 Jun 2006, Damien Sandras wrote:

> Hello,
> 
> I would like to ask the opinion of my users once again.
> 
> Please answer to the following poll in this thread:
> 1) I like Ekiga as a GNOME application, even if it adds dependancies on
> GNOME
> 
> 2) I would prefer Ekiga as a pure GTK+ application like GAIM, with its
> own configuration system
> 
> 3) I don't care
> 
> (No, QT is not an option) :)
> 
> Thanks,
> 

-- 
Derek Smithies Ph.D.                ClueCon  - The open source conference 
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Email: derek indranet co nz             Chicago, 1-3 August 2006        
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